Making the "Papers"

Kudos to the Philadelphia Inquirer for telling a story of a Coalition victory:

It began about 9 p.m. when a sharp-eyed sergeant noticed a suspicious truck that appeared to be following his humvee on patrol. By the time it was over, at 3 a.m. yesterday, the soldiers from Charlie Company, First Battalion, Eighth Cavalry Regiment had detained five men and seized the biggest cache of weapons they had seen since arriving in Iraq in March.

<...>

From two nondescript houses they pass every day, the troops pulled out three 100-pound bags of plastic explosives and fertilizer, 51 rocket-propelled grenade launchers, 16,000 rounds of ammunition, dozens of rifles and machine guns, and eight mobile-phone-connected switches for setting off roadside bombs. Most of the arms were in barrels, buried in the front yard.

Perhaps the most chilling finds were artillery shells fashioned into the kind of bomb that has routinely killed American soldiers; a pressure switch used by suicide attackers; eight Iraqi police uniforms and several police radios; several black ski masks of the sort worn by the people who have beheaded hostages on videotape.

The troops of 1-8 Cav have uncovered a number of such caches in recent months - one reason, they believe, that the frequency of attacks in their sector has diminished since November.

"The way I think about it, I may have saved my own life tonight, and hopefully a lot of other soldiers' lives as well," said Sgt. William Bowman, 29, of Fort Myers, Fla., who spotted the truck that led to the weapons.

He was on a routine patrol in southwest Baghdad with his squad when he noticed a white pickup truck pulling out of a driveway across from the city's largest Catholic church.

As it happens, soldiers had been on the lookout for such a truck, which had been seen tracking U.S. patrols. After a few minutes, they began to suspect the truck was following them, so they swerved in front of it, jumped out, and pointed their rifles at the driver. He resisted, they said.

"He's a big dude, about twice my size, and he just wouldn't go quietly," said Sgt. Jason Ellis, 28, of Springfield, Mo., whose lip was split in the struggle. Inside the truck were three artillery rounds connected to make a bomb, six AK-47 assault rifles, eight hand grenades, and a camcorder with a DVD of a masked man building a bomb.

Other soldiers arrived and took the prisoner to the base, while Ellis and his squad drove in three armored humvees to the house where they had seen the truck pull out. Inside were machine guns, rockets, grenade launchers, silencers and bomb-making equipment.

Only when other soldiers arrived with metal detectors did the troops realize what they had. Buried in the front yard were five barrels containing a fearsome array of rockets and explosive material.

Such seizures may happen frequently in this California-size, battle-wracked country, but for this company of soldiers it was a big deal. One of their buddies had been killed a few hundred yards from the house during a November ambush.

"When I see this, I think of how many people have been killed by those weapons, and how many have been saved by us finding them," said the soldiers' Iraqi interpreter, who asked to be identified only as Willy.

Events such as these occur numerous times daily in Iraq - far more often than terrorist bombings and assassinations. Unfortunately, reporting of such events is all too rare.